Preps: Lutheran’s new AD also BNC president

Monday

Jul 7, 2014 at 8:55 PMJul 7, 2014 at 8:55 PM

By Matt TrowbridgeRockford Register Star

ROCKFORD — Lutheran not only hired a veteran athletic director Monday, but the Crusaders also added someone who should be an expert at guiding them through the suddenly choppy Big Northern Conference waters.

Dirk Campbell grew up in the Big Northern as a student-athlete at Genoa-Kingston and later as a coach at both Hampshire and Genoa-Kingston and then as the AD at G-K.

“Knowing all the other athletic directors in the Big Northern makes it a huge benefit for Rockford Lutheran and our future in the Big Northern,” said basketball coach Tom Guse, who has led the Crusaders to an 85-14 boys basketball record the past three years with two state trophies. “There is a lot of respect among his peers in that AD room.

“Right now, the Big Northern seems to be in a little bit of turmoil. He’s a familiar face that all the other athletic directors have seen, and he can hopefully keep the Big Northern where it’s supposed to be.”

And Lutheran where it wants to be.

The Big Northern, long a 12-team league until expanding to 14 teams recently, will be a 16-team conference next school year when Dixon and Johnsburg join. But Johnsburg and longtime East Division members Harvard, Burlington Central, Richmond-Burton and Marengo have announced they are leaving in two years to join Woodstock and Woodstock North in the new Kishwaukee River Conference. Genoa-Kingston was invited, but turned the offer down.

Campbell will also become the president among BNC athletic directors and lead the realignment discussions at the next AD meeting in August.

That’s a comforting thought for Lutheran, which became the league’s first private school when it joined in 2003-04. Rockford Christian now gives the BNC two private schools. North Boone AD Dale Purvis has said the BNC does not want to subtract any schools, but Lutheran and Rockford Christian were both once kicked out of the NUIC in the 1990s, so nothing feels perfectly safe right now, even though Lutheran is now in a higher division in the state playoffs, which lessens public-private tensions.

“Naturally, being a private school we worry, because we’ve been through it before,” Guse said. “Dirk is the perfect guy to keep our relationship where it needs to be.”

“It’s huge that he’s friends with a lot of the ADs, including some of those ADs who maybe feel we don’t belong,” said football coach Bruce Baszali, who led a long-dormant football program that was 9-72 the previous nine years to a 20-4 record the past two seasons. “It’s nice to have a guy who will really fight for us and understands how important we are in that conference.”

And while some have said the Big Northern would never voluntarily subtract, Campbell, who stepped down as the G-K AD to go into private business in 2013, said “every option under the sun” has been discussed in recent years.

“There were discussions about how to get to 10, how to stay at 14, how to get to 16, even how to get to 18,” Campbell said.

Princeton applied to join a few years ago and was turned down. The BNC right now is looking at 11 teams in two years, an unwieldy number, but Campbell thinks that number will change on its own.

“When you do the math, I am not sure that moving is finished,” he said. “That new conference, with those five plus the two Woodstock schools, that makes seven. Seven is not a great number. To me, somebody is going to make it eight, if not two to make it nine.

“I am not sure being the president will make me able to stop anything, but we’ll find out. My intention is to keep Lutheran in the Big Northern because it’s a fantastic conference.”